MY FAVORITE TOOLS AND RESOURCES

By Susanne Rieker

Here is my ultimate list of the products, apps, tools, and resources you need to grow your online business. I’m using all of these and only recommend tools I actually love.

*Please note, some of these links are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. This helps support the blog and allows me to continue to make free content. I only recommend products that I use and love. Thank you for your support!

Hosting & Websites

I highly recommend using Siteground to host your first website. Their hosting is reliable, their customer support is great and they don’t cost an arm and a leg! You can get started at $3.95/month and upgrade your plan when your traffic is growing.

When it comes to WordPress themes, I love Avada and use it for ALL my websites and clients projects. It’s beautiful and there’s nothing you can’t build with the amazing drag-and-drop builder. Plus, the support is great and they have a super helpful Facebook group that’s there to answer all your questions.

Design

Canva is my go-to tool when it comes to creating any kind of images for my website and social media. I also love their different template options, such as Instagram images, personalized cards, Facebook ads, PDF templates and just about any social media cover photo you could ever want. I have the paid plan because I need advanced features like uploading your own fonts but the free plan is totally amazing already.

On CreativeMarket you’ll find beautiful handwritten fonts (like this one that I use for my logo and headlines), pre-designed logos, flyer designs and so much more. I have to warn you though, you can get seriously addicted to CreativeMarket! Definitely sign up for their newsletter to get access to 6 free designs every week.

Email Marketing

When you’re just starting out, the free plan from Mailchimp is perfect. But when you come to a point where you want your email marketing provider to do more, such as segmenting your lost, tagging subscribers or sending out multiple freebies and sequences, I highly recommend switching to ConvertKit for your email list building. It’s the bomb!

I use LeadPages for creating high-quality landing pages quickly and easily, such as this one. I also use it for all my opt-in-forms that open in a layer on my websites. It’s a bit pricy but can save you tons of time and I highly recommend it when get serious about building your online business and need landingpages for your freebies and courses.

Social Media

Later is a tool designed to help you schedule & manage your Instagram Posts. I absolutely love that I can upload all Instagram posts for the upcoming week from my Mac and they automatically post them for me. And they have a free plan!

Pinterest is my secret weapon because I get so much traffic from it, it’s crazy! And it’s all thanks to Tailwind, which allows me to schedule my pins on Pinterest in advance. You can use Tailwind to schedule posts, track conversations, discover content, extend your reach, and measure results.

SmarterQueue is my favorite social media scheduling tool and I use it for my Facebook pages. Everything I publish with SmarterQueue is stored in an organized library and then reposted in a never-ending queue. This way I never run out of things to post and my posts get another chance to be seen by my audience, bringing more traffic my way! It’s a total time-saver.

Since I started using the premium Social Warfare plugin (for WordPress) my traffic definitely went up because people are sharing my content much more often. This plugin makes adding sharing buttons to your wbesite super easy and they also look nice. I love the premium plugin and am happy to pay for it because I can set my own brand colors and I can add images optimized for Pinterest, too.

Online Courses & Webinars

Teachable is where I host all of my premium online courses and my Blissful Biz Hive membersite. I love that it’s easy to use, powerful, and you don’t need to know any difficult coding to set up your page and connect your payment information. It’s also affordable and starts with a free plan.

This is the screen capture software I rely on to create high quality, cleanly edited tutorial videos. I use it to record the contents of my screen when I create courses and tutorials for my clients. You can also use ScreenFlow to edit videos from your webcam and audio from your computer and external mic.

Zoom is a web video conferencing platform for high-definition audio and video conferencing. I use Zoom for my webinars, coaching calls and Facebook lives when I want to share my screen as well as talk to the camera.

Dropbox not only allows you to safely and securely storage your business files, but, if you’re working with other people, it makes it easy for you to collaborate on shared documents. And they have a basic plan that’s free.